Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

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When she senses a serious problem, Tipper is direct--and persistent. In the late spring of last year, Michael Whouley, Gore's top operative in the field, was working the New Hampshire Democratic convention at a Manchester high school when Tipper summoned him to the room where she was waiting to give her speech. "I think we have some problems here," she told him. "I have this sense that we're not pushing people, that we're not exciting people. Bill Bradley's making inroads." At the time, Gore's campaign was so confident in New Hampshire that it wasn't bothering to conduct polls there, but Tipper was listening to young staff members, campaign volunteers and voters--the people who, as Whouley put it, "really don't want to look at the Vice President and say, 'Sir, things are going crummy.'"

At home, she was trying to fix the campaign's larger problem--the candidate. "It was the fact that he was in this role, as Vice President for seven years, and it just took a while to break those circuits and go back to basics," Tipper says. "What we needed to do, and what Al does best, is campaign the way he campaigned in Tennessee...He needed to be more directly connected to the people, the way he always had been." She says the solution was something her husband "realized instinctively" as they talked about it, but he gives her credit for identifying it first. "That was a lesson that it took me a while to learn," he says. "She did see it before I did."

By the time a Labor Day poll in the Boston Globe confirmed they had a fight on their hands in New Hampshire, the campaign was in full panic. On a flight across the state from Manchester to Berlin, Whouley says, they tore up their game plan and started over, doing it the way Tipper wanted to--holding open meetings where Al would stay until the last question was answered, taking down the podium and velvet ropes between the candidate and the voters, arriving with a smaller entourage in a Chevy Suburban instead of a limousine. Later that fall, Tipper was a force behind Al's decision to pick up the campaign and move it to Nashville, leaving behind many of the Washington hangers-on. "It's hard sometimes to see outside your bunker," says former Gore aide Roy Neel. "She has a way of opening the windows."

But there are dangers in turning to those who believe, first and always, in him. As questions grew over his role in the 1996 campaign fund-raising scandals, the Vice President's White House aides tried to talk him out of rushing into the briefing room in March 1997 to proclaim--seven times, it turned out--that "no controlling legal authority" had prevented him from making fund-raising phone calls from his office. The aides remain convinced they would have succeeded in holding him back--except that Tipper and Karenna told him to follow his gut and tell it his way. Says a senior Gore aide, still stewing about how much damage the unprepared Vice President had caused himself: "He had an instinct that of course would be shared by a family member--'Hey, I'm a good person, people will see that.' But tactically, he should have made a different case."

Time.com

Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

Pauline raised a tough, pragmatic politician, but it took a life-altering family crisis to make Al see how much he had to learn from Tipper